To Big to Succeed

I really like this post by Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture. He has a great chart that shows how we went from around 18,000 banks in the 1980’s to around 8,000 today.

Hence, we end up with a few Superbanks. Ask yourself why Citibank (C), Bank of America (BAC), Washington Mutual (JPM), and Wachovia (WFC) got to be too large to manage. And once again, I am compelled to ask why it is in the country’s interest that 65% of the depository assets are held by only a handful of banks.